Weight No More (tf)

Exercise Smexercise. This nation is hemorrhaging cash, jobs, and its global reputation, and all anybody wants me to do about it is go to the gym. What for? So I can get stronger and lift more foreign-made televisions onto Wal-Mart shelves once my job gets sent to Sri Lanka? Last I checked people who exercise get old, then very sick, and then they die. The same things happen to people who spend their time reading on the couch. Sure….maybe you get an extra few years to live in a home where ladies making $7 an hour check you for bed-sores a few times a week, but I’d rather die earlier and avoid total strangers rolling me over to look at my ass. Perhaps you people painfully dragging yourselves and your way too-short shorts and obscenely expensive running shoes up and down my street in the unrelenting heat feel differently? It’s a free country after all. If you don’t die now, you’re gonna die later. It’s about the only thing we all agree on without blaming Bush, Obama, or global warming. Some take it a bit further of course, and assume a preponderance of Gold’s Gym franchises beyond the pearly gates, staffed with nubile virgins, but I’m not here to debate everlasting life. I’m here to rest, so I don’t make bad things worse. This world can be a mean place.

I don’t suggest becoming slothful like Brian Wilson was in the 70s and 80s….staying in bed and gorging on potato chips and hallucinogenic drugs. In retrospect there were worse ways to spend the days of Nixon and Reagan, but Brian may have overdone it just a bit. There is middle ground between keeping the blood flowing and willingly entering a permanent vegetative state, and if you try hard enough you can find it. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy.

I do think everybody should read more. Stop working on 6-pack abs, grab an actual 6-pack, and start filling your head with what you should know but don’t. I wish people in this country obsessed more with their astounding lack of, say, geographical knowledge, than they do with the size of their pants. Most high school kids can’t find Europe on a map. Europe. Forget asking them to pinpoint an actual country. We’re talking continents here. And I do think it should be illegal for the United States to be involved in a war unless every person of voting age in the US knows who we’re fighting, and where exactly the enemy is located. If US voters fail the quiz, they get drafted. Roosevelt asked our parents and grand-parents to sacrifice during a time of war. Today, we’re asked to shop more.

Ok, I seemed to have drifted some from the exercise thing. But that’s what happens when you have all this excess energy, like me. If I was worn down by excessive barbell use, I’d have no energy for such verbal meanderings. And that would be a pity. Who wants to get from A to Z by going through the alphabet in order anyway? Organizational freaks, that’s who. Like runners.